That's awesomely useless, it straddles the line between programming and art.
I am sure it was a great and fun learning experience.
Well done !
GTP 6 hours ago [-]
Well, not 100% useless: I can see its use for applications running inside Docker containers. Yes, there are ways to have GUI applications rendered from the inside of a container, but maybe this is easier than getting the Dockerfile right.
EDIT: nevermind, doing this with Docker seems much easier than I expected [0]. I'll try it tomorrow, I'm curious to see if the proposed solution works on Windows as well.
Yeah, I can’t explain why this project makes me so happy because I struggle to think of any time where I’d need this, but it puts a big, dumb grin on my face.
I think one significant difference though is that Browsh renders actual text for text content, so you can copy and paste, etc.
mmulet 2 hours ago [-]
You will be able to copy/paste with term.everything once I implement the Wayland copy/paste interface (wl_data_device_manager).
pawelduda 6 hours ago [-]
Well, you can run apps on any less capable device with ssh and proper terminal display. You can limit data usage by offloading video buffering to the host (however not sure if that's net positive saving). And put the host behind VPN to avoid getting region blocks.
blooalien 3 hours ago [-]
I actually used to tunnel Netscape Navigator via SSH to my Commodore Amiga desktop via an Xorg server way back in the 56K phone modem Internet days from my ISP's SSH user account login, since Amiga didn't have Netscape (and even if it did, the Amiga likely would have choked on it, massive and bloated as Netscape was), and the browser AmigaOS did have just wasn't up to the task of normal day-to-day usage of the Web as it existed back then. Fun times.
Sure am glad of the broadband Internet and modern "powerhouse" PCs we have so readily available today. Hell, even the computer most everyone carries in their pocket these days is infinitely more powerful than the average desktop machines of my childhood. :)
unleaded 6 hours ago [-]
Oops, we've invented X
snozolli 8 hours ago [-]
It reminds me a bit of chindōgu, the Japanese art (?) of useless inventions. There's a particular delight to ingenious, but absurd or useless creations.
hnlmorg 5 hours ago [-]
That’s a term I’ve not heard in literally decades.
Thanks for the reminder
anthk 6 hours ago [-]
Emacs it's full of chindogus. Also, there's geekcode, xroach, megahal/hailo, xneko, aatv and mplayer rendering videos over aalib, aaquake, eforth running in the subleq virtual machine...
hiccuphippo 5 hours ago [-]
I remember watching the World Cup over telnet with one of those aalib libraries years ago. The signal arrived 5 seconds earlier than the TV :)
anthk 4 hours ago [-]
With a small framebuffer font aatv was almost watchable over a distance, but OFC fbtv made it obsolete, and ditto with mplayer -vo aalib as movies worked in the framebuffer just as fine as X.
But I remember the BB demo and I still remember these catchy s3m modules...
And, well, not AA, but I still play today tons of text adventures and roguelikes (and BSDgames and such), and my main X environment it's CLI/TUI based except for CWM (Window manager), MPV/MuPDF/NSxiv (images) and djview4 for DJVU files..
DiggyJohnson 5 hours ago [-]
I’m a fan of `xeyes`
watersb 5 hours ago [-]
xeyes can be Actually Useful; two eyes always looking at the cursor...
your animal brain hardwired to discern the direction of gaze of the eyes facing you (citations appreciated)...
Helps me find the mouse cursor on a big screen if I lose track, even with small parallax angle.
On macOS, I just wiggle the mouse back and forth, and the cursor gets really big, it pops out at you.
I generally don't keep `xeyes` running. But it's a righteous, venerable hack.
robot-wrangler 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mmulet 8 hours ago [-]
<3
k-warburton 7 hours ago [-]
I came here to make the same comment. I want to try this myself just for the fun of it and the grin it will put on my face. Nice work!
mmulet 7 hours ago [-]
You can have a <3 too!
dmayle 4 hours ago [-]
Definitely not useless!
I run a ttyd server to get terminal over https, and I have used carbonyl over that to get work done. That's limited to a web browser (to get access to resources not exposed via the public internet), so having full GUI support is very useful
user3939382 15 minutes ago [-]
I've been working on the same thing but with a totally different approach. Good work! Keep it up.
reactordev 7 hours ago [-]
This is one of those things that pushes the boundaries to nowhere, yet everywhere at the same time whilst being incredibly awesome and something you can show off ad infinitum. Outstanding! Not sure how we’ll implement vdi now! Gives ghost in the shell a whole new meaning.
I had the change a couple of line to make it work because term.everything takes input only from stdin (this way it works of ssh and is pretty broadly compatible across terminals).
1. I had to remap another key to the control key (which is usually used to send signals like sigterm)
2. Then I had to change the timeout in which keys are pressed. When using stdin, you get a keydown event, but you don't get a key up event (ever). So I have to guess when you want to key up. Most of the time, I can send key up right away. But, it looks like doom has some sort of key debounce, so I had to wait 50-100 ms for keyup. Then there is the problem of if you want to walk forward in games you usually hold down up arrow, but now you have to rapidly press it! Not ideal, but it does work, and it it playable.
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
Phenomenal!!!
I used to write telnet games so I know all about keypress up never coming through. Even with immediate mode (so repeated keys will send repeated key codes while held down) it never tells you when it stops. You have to read the buffer ascii byte by byte. Still, awesome to see. Great work!!!
anthk 6 hours ago [-]
aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
But that isn’t this, answered above.
marcodiego 4 hours ago [-]
This is interesting, but there was something that was even more impressive many years ago: a GTK theme that rendered all decoration and widgets using text chars and a GDK backend that rendered to text. Combine both and you could run any GTK app on a terminal with legible text and a beautiful TUI.
This is such a cool project. Personally, I think there are so many interesting use cases that can be built on top of Wayland, like https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
and this
warwren 8 hours ago [-]
I remember the carbonyl project to run chromium in the terminal that got me really excited (https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl) but it eventually became unmaintained.
This is pretty much that but supercharged. Definitely really cool to see. Good work!
rc_kas 46 minutes ago [-]
WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes
Guestmodinfo 2 hours ago [-]
I like it. I always want to run things in a terminal. Because
1. I used to think that's more secure than X
2. I always seem to get better audio of the videos that I run in tty and my mouse is much smoother in the tty. Yes I can move mouse in tty.
Also someone mentioned a cool project like carbonyl. They also mentioned brow.sh which I have heard but they described it in detail so that's another plus when term.everything kind of projects come they drag other cool projects to he foreground
Point 1 of mine may be pure superstition.
How term.everything works on tty I don't know maybe it will be horriblebecause of the resolution thing but still it's a nice direction.
IshKebab 4 hours ago [-]
I started working on this with the Kitty image protocol, but unfortunately that protocol is really unsuited to this sort of thing. Performance will be awful.
The protocol is sort of:
1. I'd like you to display this PNG. Here's the data: ...
2. Ok I've got the data.
3. Ok now display it at this position.
4. Ok now remove it from the screen.
We're talking motion-PNG here. Just think about how awful that is.
I wish someone would add some kind of AV1-over-terminal protocol. That would be actually useful.
The other thing I was going to try was a custom GUI that used normal terminal text for the text of widgets, but Kitty images for the rest. It's quite a hard problem though.
I truly appreciate the relational thinking and pointing out other projects that might interest ppl who are excited about this :) Having said that, term.everything seems to be much larger in scope than a browser, unless I'm mistaken
mmulet 8 hours ago [-]
That’s right. These other projects are awesome, but they’re attempting something different. It’s apples to oranges.
This could be used on build machines I own where I occasionally need to interact with the desktop and/or browser on the machine and vnc or other desktop sharing is impractical or exposes security issues.
tracker1 9 hours ago [-]
This is pretty cool, I can see this being useful when I need to run a one-off remotely. Not sure about attaching a running program then detaching again, or mirroring... I wouldn't mind being able to SSH to my desktop and manipulate say the running Discord client, or similar.
Another similar thing that I'd been meaning to look into is the RDP remote apps stuff.
anthk 6 hours ago [-]
Just use a CLI discord client, or fire up an IRC client against some Bitlbee server.
tracker1 5 hours ago [-]
It was an example, not the only use case. 99% of what I want to do remote is just fine over SSH (over Wireguard)... Mostly remote VS Code usage since my desktop is much beefier than my laptop when travelling.
mathfailure 2 hours ago [-]
Does running something via Term.everything consume more or less resources, than running that something directly?
mmulet 2 hours ago [-]
Depends on what resolution your terminal is set to. (Not the resolution of the GUI app you use, just the resolution you display it). At low resolution (640x480) it’s pretty performant, but at 4K I can hear my fans going full blast.
Forgret 2 days ago [-]
I wish you success in further development, don't stop!
mmulet 2 days ago [-]
Thanks!
teknopaul 6 hours ago [-]
Someone needs to make bash_completion really trivial to write.
It isn't: and even copy paste is hard.
Clever people write apps that are bash_completion friendly.
If first main arg is bash friendly
mycli myfunc ...
Myour whole cliapp becomes "discoverable" with one tab keystroke that you probably already typed hopefully anyway.
Never need to advertise a new feature.
Deprecate by removing from completion without breaking scripts.
Then _everything_ already is in your cli, because someone already did it.
serbuvlad 4 hours ago [-]
We got Wayland over vt100 escape codes over ssh over tcp before we got a headless Wayland VNC/RDP solution.
kposehn 7 hours ago [-]
Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad
Absolutely no mouse support though, anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?
(still working on getting vscode to run smoothly)
oarsinsync 5 hours ago [-]
> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support
Blink terminal for iOS and iPadOS. Ships with vscode support built in too.
watersb 4 hours ago [-]
I love this.
I would go for weeks just in a large framebuffer terminal, no GUI running. And I still run some servers that way.
Terminally insanely great!
igorhvr 1 hours ago [-]
This is so cool - thank you! I have a very (ahem) useful purpose for this: I use a command line application that calls back to a browser during authentication and that alone prevented me from doing what I needed/wanted from an ssh terminal... I will now happily laugh my ass off as it launches firefox from inside my terminal every time I use it.
beckthompson 9 hours ago [-]
Super cool! I also really am glad you added videos and examples in your github repo its nice to get an overview
1 days ago [-]
xiphias2 8 hours ago [-]
- Can you run a compositor inside a compositor? I'd love to just ssh to a server and run hyprland
- doesTerm.everything run inside tmux with automatic window resizing? I guess not, but it would be cool
mmulet 5 hours ago [-]
1. Yes, but it depends on your compositor because your compositor needs to be able to run as a nested Wayland client. I think there is support for this in wlroots based Wayland compositors, but I'm not sure if hyperland supports it.
2. I think it will work, but I haven't tried. I redraw the terminal window every time the "termed" window updates. So, if you are playing a video for example and you dynamically resize the window, it should update the size automatically. If you are viewing a static window it might not.
maxglute 8 hours ago [-]
Stupid, love it. Occasionally I'll use shaderglass ascii shader on oled screen to play videos with pixel ratio that makes UI unreadable, but it's charming experience.
christophilus 9 hours ago [-]
Wow. This is amazing. I have started running a lot of stuff in containers by default for a whole host of reasons, and this may make my workflow even better on the occasions when I want to run a graphical app.
lazyfanatic42 9 hours ago [-]
It is funny but this is what I wished things did when I first started using Linux back in the day. '98-'99 timeframe, then I "learned" better that there was Xorg/X11,etc.
Looks like archive.org is down right now… so I guess we’ll have to wait for GIFS. Sorry:
chaps 10 hours ago [-]
Neat! I did a similar project many years ago just to see if I could with ANSI color stuff to animate video in my terminal. Worked really well, but it looked like absolute butt (unlike this project).
Nicely done!
xarope 3 hours ago [-]
one is required to ask about Gwerm, and why he is not moving... :-P
mmulet 2 hours ago [-]
But really, in the last 24 hours term.everything has accumulated 1500 stars, 600 upvotes on HN, 185 upvotes on lobsters (the highest upvoted `show` tag of all time), but despite all of that, you, my friend, are the first to ask about Gwerm.
That means you win the secret prize! A custom Gwerm T-shirt! I’ll send the details to the Gmail you have linked to your account.
mmulet 3 hours ago [-]
He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.
Koshkin 6 hours ago [-]
> in the terminal
A note to myself: this won't work in the text mode.
SkidanovAlex 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't the first example (with the cartoon) in text mode?
nixpulvis 9 hours ago [-]
This is one of those things I'm going to keep in my back pocket for a very specific time I need it for a weird reason.
I love it.
alkh 11 hours ago [-]
This is so cool, thanks for sharing! Having this on a Mac would be great but I understand that this might be a huge undertaking :)
mmulet 10 hours ago [-]
I definitely want to make a macOS version, but I haven’t even looked into it yet. So, I don’t know the level of hacking required. It definitely doesn’t sound like anything Apple would have an api for, so it would probably be a vnc or accessibility api trick.
krackers 10 hours ago [-]
I think there is an API (that was added with sidecar) to create a virtual display. So at best you could retrieve the framebuffer and then display that. I don't think there is an easy exposed way to get per-window information, aside from doing a screencapture (which likely would not work if you also wanted to hide the window).
mmulet 9 hours ago [-]
Interesting… do you have a link to the docs? The easiest thing prob would be to set the window to be fullscreen, but on that virtual display. That would accomplish per window screen capture.
krackers 8 hours ago [-]
It's a private API CGVirtualDisplay, but mostly well reverse engineered. Here's one example I found of a wrapper library
Do I need to be using wayland to try this? I'm still on x11.
mmulet 7 hours ago [-]
No you do not. It works on x11 and Wayland host systems. I built the Wayland compositor from scratch and it does not have any dependencies on libwayland. So, you don’t have to install Wayland at all.
didip 10 hours ago [-]
I was about to asked about X11, but ended up learning about Wayland.
Thanks for sharing!
lxe 9 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it
OhMeadhbh 8 hours ago [-]
This will be very useful when it exits beta.
pancsta 4 hours ago [-]
Another custom wayland compositor, this one not written in a scripting language.
Outstanding project! Keep it up. If it ever gets renamed, consider - Terminal.All, T.All, or TAll.
FergusArgyll 8 hours ago [-]
Termin-all was right there
mmulet 8 hours ago [-]
The deciding factor was that I just liked using term as a verb.
komali2 8 hours ago [-]
This is an incredibly cool project and you should be proud for building it.
QuiCasseRien 6 hours ago [-]
insane ! but i still wonder for the use case ^^
quotemstr 9 hours ago [-]
Great job! If you tug on this thread long and hard enough, you develop this enough and you get RDP (which you can try via xrdp, GNOME's remoting thing, etc.).
The reason the terminal ecosystem doesn't get much more sophisticated over time isn't just the herd-of-cats fragmentation, but also evaporative cooling: people who do really cool things with terminal come to realize that what they really want is remote desktop (perhaps rootless) and leave terminal stuff as-is while they invest in more sophisticated systems instead.
rochak 8 hours ago [-]
Wow this is incredible
howyesno 7 hours ago [-]
"I feel like every single day I hear about another terminal file viewer. I say, stop making terminal file viewers because you can just use the file viewer you already have! In your terminal!"
LMAO
babypuncher 8 hours ago [-]
Combine this with desktop-tui[1] and say goodbye to graphical desktop managers forever!
Looks like a nice way to run a gui app on a VM remotely over an ssh connection?
graemep 9 hours ago [-]
Because its cool.
vidarh 10 hours ago [-]
Why not?
2 days ago [-]
20after4 9 hours ago [-]
You could use a terminal graphics protocol to render real graphics. But there is already waypipe¹ to do that kind of remoting. Without using an actual terminal.
> You could use a terminal graphics protocol to render real graphics.
It already does that[1].
> But there is already waypipe¹ to do that kind of remoting.
That requires Wayland on the client side, doesn't it? I don't expect this to be super-practical anyway, but it's fun to see how far you can push a terminal.
[1] "If your terminal supports images (like kitty or iterm2) you can render windows at full resolution (performance may degrade)."
I am sure it was a great and fun learning experience.
Well done !
EDIT: nevermind, doing this with Docker seems much easier than I expected [0]. I'll try it tomorrow, I'm curious to see if the proposed solution works on Windows as well.
[0] https://medium.com/@priyamsanodiya340/running-gui-applicatio...
[1] https://www.brow.sh/
Sure am glad of the broadband Internet and modern "powerhouse" PCs we have so readily available today. Hell, even the computer most everyone carries in their pocket these days is infinitely more powerful than the average desktop machines of my childhood. :)
Thanks for the reminder
But I remember the BB demo and I still remember these catchy s3m modules...
https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/
And, well, not AA, but I still play today tons of text adventures and roguelikes (and BSDgames and such), and my main X environment it's CLI/TUI based except for CWM (Window manager), MPV/MuPDF/NSxiv (images) and djview4 for DJVU files..
your animal brain hardwired to discern the direction of gaze of the eyes facing you (citations appreciated)...
Helps me find the mouse cursor on a big screen if I lose track, even with small parallax angle.
On macOS, I just wiggle the mouse back and forth, and the cursor gets really big, it pops out at you.
I generally don't keep `xeyes` running. But it's a righteous, venerable hack.
I run a ttyd server to get terminal over https, and I have used carbonyl over that to get work done. That's limited to a web browser (to get access to resources not exposed via the public internet), so having full GUI support is very useful
But can it run doom?
I had the change a couple of line to make it work because term.everything takes input only from stdin (this way it works of ssh and is pretty broadly compatible across terminals).
1. I had to remap another key to the control key (which is usually used to send signals like sigterm)
2. Then I had to change the timeout in which keys are pressed. When using stdin, you get a keydown event, but you don't get a key up event (ever). So I have to guess when you want to key up. Most of the time, I can send key up right away. But, it looks like doom has some sort of key debounce, so I had to wait 50-100 ms for keyup. Then there is the problem of if you want to walk forward in games you usually hold down up arrow, but now you have to rapidly press it! Not ideal, but it does work, and it it playable.
I used to write telnet games so I know all about keypress up never coming through. Even with immediate mode (so repeated keys will send repeated key codes while held down) it never tells you when it stops. You have to read the buffer ascii byte by byte. Still, awesome to see. Great work!!!
http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/screenshots/
This is pretty much that but supercharged. Definitely really cool to see. Good work!
Also someone mentioned a cool project like carbonyl. They also mentioned brow.sh which I have heard but they described it in detail so that's another plus when term.everything kind of projects come they drag other cool projects to he foreground
Point 1 of mine may be pure superstition.
How term.everything works on tty I don't know maybe it will be horriblebecause of the resolution thing but still it's a nice direction.
The protocol is sort of:
1. I'd like you to display this PNG. Here's the data: ...
2. Ok I've got the data.
3. Ok now display it at this position.
4. Ok now remove it from the screen.
We're talking motion-PNG here. Just think about how awful that is.
I wish someone would add some kind of AV1-over-terminal protocol. That would be actually useful.
The other thing I was going to try was a custom GUI that used normal terminal text for the text of widgets, but Kitty images for the rest. It's quite a hard problem though.
https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
P.S. This is very cool btw.
https://github.com/chase/awrit
Another similar thing that I'd been meaning to look into is the RDP remote apps stuff.
It isn't: and even copy paste is hard. Clever people write apps that are bash_completion friendly.
If first main arg is bash friendly
mycli myfunc ...
Myour whole cliapp becomes "discoverable" with one tab keystroke that you probably already typed hopefully anyway.
Never need to advertise a new feature.
Deprecate by removing from completion without breaking scripts.
Then _everything_ already is in your cli, because someone already did it.
Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.
Absolutely no mouse support though, anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?
(still working on getting vscode to run smoothly)
Blink terminal for iOS and iPadOS. Ships with vscode support built in too.
I would go for weeks just in a large framebuffer terminal, no GUI running. And I still run some servers that way.
Terminally insanely great!
- doesTerm.everything run inside tmux with automatic window resizing? I guess not, but it would be cool
2. I think it will work, but I haven't tried. I redraw the terminal window every time the "termed" window updates. So, if you are playing a video for example and you dynamically resize the window, it should update the size automatically. If you are viewing a static window it might not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700
Nicely done!
That means you win the secret prize! A custom Gwerm T-shirt! I’ll send the details to the Gmail you have linked to your account.
A note to myself: this won't work in the text mode.
I love it.
https://github.com/enfp-dev-studio/node-mac-virtual-display/...
Thanks for sharing!
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
The reason the terminal ecosystem doesn't get much more sophisticated over time isn't just the herd-of-cats fragmentation, but also evaporative cooling: people who do really cool things with terminal come to realize that what they really want is remote desktop (perhaps rootless) and leave terminal stuff as-is while they invest in more sophisticated systems instead.
1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui
1. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
It already does that[1].
> But there is already waypipe¹ to do that kind of remoting.
That requires Wayland on the client side, doesn't it? I don't expect this to be super-practical anyway, but it's fun to see how far you can push a terminal.
[1] "If your terminal supports images (like kitty or iterm2) you can render windows at full resolution (performance may degrade)."